Upgraded my HDD to SDD. Can boot successfully via USB but will not boot when in MBP

Solution 1:

Thank you for all the responses. I believe I have tried everything and have lost count of how many time I have switched the drives, formatted and reinstalled the Lion.

I figured out the problem, in the end, it turned out to be a problem with the firmware. The firmware on the drive was not compatible with late 2011 MBP and needed to be downgraded. After downgrading the firmware to 0309 it worked like a treat!

Thank you for all the responses, most appreciated. I hope this helps some people out.

Solution 2:

I know it might sound simple, but have you tried holding down Option while booting and seeing if the drive is visible to boot from. If so, select it.

If you tell the Mac to boot from a drive that is on a certain port or connected a certain way, and then move it to a different port or connection type, i.e. from USB to SATA in your case, the computer itself won't know that you made the move. It will look for the USB drive that is was booting off of because that is where you said to look.

I had a similar issue when it came to booting off my new SSD in my MacBook Pro. I told it to boot off my SSD when it was in a original HD SATA Port and then moved it to the place where the optical drive was using an OptiBay, putting the old HD back in its original bay so that I have two HDs. It booted up and spun for about 30 seconds, way too long for an SSD, and then found the old drive that I still had in the original HD bay, it never found the SSD because it wasn't where I had told it it was, so it then went and looked for things it could boot off and found the old HD before the new SSD.

Try holding the Option key while booting and see if you can find your HD and boot from it, once you do, set it as the default boot drive in your system preferences so that it knows that its supposed to boot off of it.

I hope that this helps.

Solution 3:

I had this issue also but discovered that Carbon Cloner gives boot priority to the Connection used to clone the drive i.e. USB. (If You Clone the drive via usb it will only boot via usb)

So I removed the main drive, inserted the drive I wanted to clone into the main slot, and cloned the old drive by connecting it to USB with the new drive in the main terminal. This worked perfectly and I have no issues with the cloned SSD not booting.

Hope This Helps!